Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Myth of Majority-Minority America

It?s conceivable that 40 years from now nobody will care about race at all. But if they do still care, it will still be the case that?by definition?whiteness is the racial definition of the sociocultural majority. If the only way for that to happen is to recruit large swathes of the Hispanic and fractionally Asian population into whiteness, then surely it will happen. Indeed, while the Census Bureau has always been very clear that some people are white, others black, and yet others Native American or Indian, the federal government has frequently changed its mind about the rest. The first time an additional option showed up was in Census 1870?s addition of a ?Chinese? race. By 1890 you were also allowed to be ?Japanese,? and ?mulatto,? ?quadroon,? and ?octoroon? categories were implemented for the fractionally black. These mixed-race categories vanished in 1900, but mulatto returned in 1910, and in 1920 ?Hindu,? ?Korean,? and ?Filipino? became races. Mulatto vanished in 1930, and ?Mexican? became a race, though people of Mexican ancestry had been living in large parts of the United States since those parts of the country actually belonged to Mexico. In 1940, Mexicans were granted white status?a measure backed up by a 1943 Texas law passed in part as an act of wartime solidarity, in appreciation of Latin American support for the anti-Nazi cause.

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